Home and Student is $140 and you get Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Onenote.

Home and Business is $220 and you get everything in Home and Student, plus Outlook.

Does Outlook justify the $80 dollar difference? Are there better email clients for less?

Personally I use Apple Mail on ML and Entourage on my iBook running Leopard.

For my wife it is everything. I do not use Outlook, so does not matter to me. But since my wife requires it and you get 2 licences, I have it installed. Have never even opened it. Not worth $80 to me as I use Mail.app.

Microsoft has done a lot to sweeten the pot to attract consumers into the subscription model, enlisting nearly everything but the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. While the lowest-cost perpetual-license version of Office 2013—Office 2013 Home and Student—is priced at just under $140 and includes the four core applications (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote), Office 365 Home Premium Edition comes with all of those applications plus the Outlook mail and calendar client, Access database, and Publisher desktop publishing tool.

People here are mixing up two separate product lines. Office 2013 is for Windows only, no Mac version. It's available by download only, but doesn't expire.

The subscription version, for use on up to 5 PC or Mac computers, is Office 365 Home Premium. It's $99 per year and includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, Outlook, MS Access, and MS Publisher, the products included in Office Professional.

As of today, Office 2011 for Mac is now available as a download with only the product key in the box, no media. This is the only version now available at the Apple on-line store.

Does Outlook justify the $80 dollar difference? Are there better email clients for less?

If you need to connect to Exchange then yes. Otherwise, probably not. I used Outlook with Exchange for years. WhenI switched to the Mac and didn't connect to Exchange any more, I found mail.app easier to use than Outlook Mac. My needs are fairly simple and mail meets them.